Lisa Schwarzbaum

Jaoui neatly, gently, firmly slips political commentary into Let It Rain's articulate mayhem.

More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present.

A marvel of warm collaboration and shared jokes about husbands and wives, shot both in dreamscape color and pristine black and white.

What matters is that Tiana triumphs as both a girl and a frog, that dreams are fulfilled, wrongs are righted, love prevails, and music unites not only a princess and a frog but also kids and grown-ups.

One of the wonders of the holiday season.

There's an adult life force in every frame of this luxuriously paced work, even in the sight of rain and a lady's stocking.

Loving, Playful, and spectacularly well made, Super 8 is easily the best summer movie of the year - of many years.

''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies.

There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness.

Footnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument.

It's also one of the great movies of the year - an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction.

Almodóvar's masterwork, is a spectacular synthesis of everything that has always interested him -- proud women, lovely boys, beautiful drag queens, grand movie stars, gorgeous frocks, wild wallpaper .

Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama.

If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this prize-winning honey.

This stunning movie -- one of the very best of the year -- makes a much read American classic feel new and freshly devastating.

The very opposite of a storybook romance, and also the very model of a great comedy for our values-driven time.

You could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo.

Bestows generous blessings on all that's good in Englishness, in moviedom, and, of course, in cheese.

No one charts the wilds of childhood more precisely than the Dardennes.

Beautifully led by birdlike Sylvie Testud as an ailing young woman in a wheelchair, every character (pilgrim and helper alike) exhibits a soul. And shaped with confident talent by the Austrian filmmaker, every serenely composed shot matters.

Stunning and compassionate period drama.

Hersonski quietly and insistently unravels reality from "reality"; her commitment to archival authenticity is its own tribute to those no longer able to testify.

Like everything else in this superb work of art, ''Shrinking Lover'' is exquisitely Almodóvarian. It's funny, tender, a little shocking, and it pays homage to what we know about movies: that they can move us beyond words.

This is one of the year's best. To paraphrase the Wild Thing named KW, I could eat it up, I love it so.

It took director-producer Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance When We Were Kings, his thrilling documentary about the legendary 1974 heavyweight-championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. But the lag time has only deepened the impact of this thrilling documentary: All sad thoughts of Ali as a wounded warrior fall away in the glow of seeing the champ at his best.

The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.

In this typically exquisite, nuanced, memory-infused work from master British filmmaker Terence Davies, we believe every minute of the torment of Hester (Rachel Weisz).

Facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, the older woman enrolls in a poetry class, desperate to find the words to describe beauty before language fails her. She does even better: She herself becomes a kind of poem about what it means to really see the world.